Transplant recipient dies after contracting ‘aggressive’ cancer from his organ donor in tragic ‘one-of-a-kind’ case

A TRANSPLANT recipient has died of cancer after contracting the illness from his organ donor.

The unnamed patient, 69, from Arizona underwent an organ transplant to treat his liver cancer – before tragically contracting a more aggressive form of it and dying months later.

Cases of ‘transplanted cancer’ are so rare that there aren’t statistics for it, and only a a handful of sporadic cases have been documented in medical literature.

It only took six months for the successful transplant to turn into tragedy, with doctors believing the rare disease originated from the donor.

Doctors in the case report wrote: “To our knowledge, this is the only case in literature describing donor‐derived lung cancer in a liver graft without known malignancy in the donor.”

Based on the lab results taken after the cruel twist of fate, doctors were able to determine the tumours that killed him were confined solely to his new liver.

The patient was undergoing the operation to treat alcoholic cirrhosis.

This is a liver disease that causes scarring of the organ due to excessive drinking.

It is reported that doctors did not detect cancer anywhere else in his body.

The procedure took place at The Mayo Clinic in Phoenix, Arizona.

Four months later, a routine ultrasound revealed two solid masses in his liver.

At the time, doctors still ruled these unexpected developments as “indeterminate”.

Then, just six weeks after that warning sign, three new masses were revealed which were then noted as “innumerable”.

An aggressive form of metastatic lung cancer was suggested from these findings.

Metastatic means that the cancer has spread to other parts of the body from where it originated.

Doctors wrote: “The… features of the tumour were distinctly different from those of the prior HCC.

“These findings were suspicious for donor‐transmitted malignancy.

“A polymerase chain reaction‐based assay [PCR test] strongly suggested that the newly diagnosed metastatic carcinoma in the liver originated from the donor.”

This suggests that the organ donor, who had died in 2019, had undiagnosed advanced lung cancer that had spread to his liver.

The donor, 50, did not have any history of lung tumours or cancer, making this discovery even more unexpected.

It is not believed that pre-donation testing by doctors uncovered anything to cause concern.

Due to the spread of his cancer, the patient was not eligible to receive another liver transplant and anti-rejection medications.

The man received chemotherapy drugs and the cancer appeared to be stabilizing, but a subsequent scan revealed it had progressed beyond treatment.

A case like this has only ever been reported one other time.

In that instance, a 41-year-old man whose donor was discovered to have lung cancer several days after the transplant.

But this is the first-known case of donor-derived cancer from a donor with no known cancers.

A 2013 review of these cases said that: “The incidence of any cancer transmission is so low that sporadic case reports are the main source of information.

“The low frequency and very variable stage of cancers mean that definitive risk calculations are impossible.”

The authors added, that due to just how rare cases like these are, data is likely to underestimate the true amount of occurrences.